In the dark months following an economic collapse, four squatters make their home together in an empty apartment in Brooklyn's rundown Sunset Park, in Paul Auster's 2010 novel. In seemingly disparate elements—an enigmatic young man who photographs the objects left behind by evicted families when he cleans the properties; the Hospital for Broken Things, which specializes in repairing the artifacts of a vanished world; William Wyler's 1946 classic The Best Years of Our Lives; a celebrated actress preparing to return to Broadway; and a publisher trying to save his business and his marriage—Auster weaves together an immensely moving novel about contemporary America and its ghosts.

"Passionately literary ... every element is saturated with implication as each wounded, questing character's story illuminates our tragic flaws and profound need for connection, coherence, and beauty. In a time of daunting crises and change, Auster reminds us of lasting things, of love, art, and 'the miraculous strangeness of being alive'."—Booklist (starred review)

"[Auster is] right that the rules of fiction should be bent. Writers not always determined to please the reader are the ones who break new ground. Auster's renegade impulse has set him apart, earning him devoted fans. He has also been taken to task for following his own formula too often. In Sunset Park, he deviates from it by telling a fairly linear story, although there are still lengthy passages in which he interrupts the narrative by pasting in baseball trivia, a treatise on behalf of the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and quotations from the classic movie The Best Years of Our Lives. Yet if Auster can't escape his own fixations—if his characters still mourn the passing moment even as they live in it, still yearn to hold on to the present even as it slips away—maybe that's because this nostalgia is one universal human desire, made manifest in every photograph and every novel and every effort to leave a mark."—NYTBR